[Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion

[Delirium]

Samuel Klein wrote:
> Hello Mark,
> 
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Delirium<delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> 
>> I'd personally place myself on the "objecting to WMF expansion" side, at
>> least in general sentiment. With larger organizations, you can indeed do
>> more, but also run more risks. In particular, organizations with large
>> staffs run the risk of bureaucratization; and community/volunteer-based
>> organizations with large staffs risk capture of the overall project by
>> the official organization, rather than the community and volunteers they
>> ostensibly act as support staff for.
> 
> Can you say more about this  -- both what more you can do and the
> risks run -- and cite the track record[s] you mention?


Well, the last part is a judgment call: I'm personally skeptical of the 
extent to which most non-profit organizations remain representative of 
the communities they were originally started by, as opposed to the 
professional staff and boards of directors they're currently run by. 
That is, is the organization itself directing the effort, taking 
decisions from the top down; or is the organization there to provide 
legal and financial backing for implementation of a community's goals? I 
prefer the 2nd variety.

One example I consider near ideal is the relationship between Software 
in the Public Interest (a non-profit organization) and the Debian 
project (a community-run project that SPI is the legal and financial 
backing for). Despite not being a non-profit, the relationship between 
Canonical and Ubuntu is also almost along those lines, too. In both 
cases, there's a separate organizational structure for the community and 
for the legal organization--- SPI does not appoint Debian project leads, 
and the SPI board does not pass Debian resolutions. Wikimedia so far is 
run almost like that, though not quite as strongly.

Basically: why does formal organization with legal structure exist at 
all? For purely online organizations, it *almost* doesn't need to exist. 
But, a decentralized group of people with no legal status has difficulty 
maintaining a server room, purchasing bandwidth, and similar things. So 
one does need to exist. And once one exists, perhaps it can provide some 
other assistance-- if a group of community members think something ought 
to be done that requires some legal status or money, they could go to 
the organization with a request, like we currently do with a paid tech 
staff that implements (some) (sensible) feature requests. But I'm 
worried about whether that will creep towards the organization itself 
increasingly running the show, as opposed to playing mainly a 
supporting/implementation/financing role.


> Do you feel
> there are similar capacity/risk tradeoffs of larger/more inclusive
> communities?  (some might say that the current editing community is
> becoming an organization separating itself from the general public,
> building barriers to participation; and that this [de facto]
> organization risks capturing the overall knowledge-sharing project
> within existing guidelines and policies, rather than encouraging bold
> participation among the wider world, who are the ostensible audience
> and body of future contributors.)

I think there are risks/tradeoffs there, but I don't see them as quite 
the same kind. For, say, the English Wikipedia (what I'm most familiar 
with), "Why does it work at all?" is a pretty large question, but I 
think to a large extent it comes down precisely to the fact that our 
community *isn't* the public at large, but is a subset of the public 
that is generally well-informed, has some degree of shared culture and 
community norms, and is committed to a set of goals not everyone shares. 
It's worth thinking about whether we're unnecessarily excluding people 
who could share those goals, or could change things to improve the 
quality of the encyclopedia; but I think also worth thinking about 
whether there are important elements of those cultural norms that are 
key to the success of the project and shouldn't be messed with lightly.

-Mark